I don't. I usually dump it in the garden. Seems to me the cold weather would kill any 'bad stuff'. Never tried to reuse it. Anyone else have experience with this?

I just dump mine into the clay streak I have running through the vegetable garden. It's slowly getting loosened up with all the old potting mix and compost.

I will be reusing my old soil this year. For 2 reason. 1 we are in larging the tomato bed so need more soil there. 2 I bought some hug planters it will take ALOT of soil to fill them. And I am trying to think of what I have on hand to fill the bottoms of the containers first like shipping pellets which shrink after a time to crushed cans. Not sure I want the rust run off of the cans.

But as long as you fertilize the plants in pots it should be just fine to reuse the soil.

Paula

There's always the caution to reusing your soil, particularly for starting seeds, as the fungus that causes damping off may exist in the reused soil. To address this issue, I simply wet (soak it pretty good, actually) my soil and bake it in a 200 degree oven for about 30 minutes, let it cool, then I'm on my way. Damping off isn't usually a problem with wintersowing, but why take the risk?

The other danger there is that if you don't do something to kill off what's in the soil (in addition to yucky stuff in the soil that is harmful to your new seedlings), you run the danger of the seeds that didn't sprout last year, sprouting THIS year... Gee, ask me how I know that? I now have a lovely philodendron in my office that I planted using some "waste" garden soil last year, complete with a random pepper plant that sprouted about a month after I planted the whole thing up!

I even reused some peat pellets that I had tried to indoor-sow some stuff last year that had never sprouted. Didn't do the heat treatment on some of them (got too excited cuz I was already so far behind--I just wanted to get some dirt under my nails already!), and I now have some NOT tomato in one of my tomato starts. Could be pansy, petunia, or maybe even strawberry? I'm still gonna wintersow everything as a backup!

paulan, 3-4 plastic gal pots upside down in the bottom of large containers take up space and cut down on the amount of mix needed. It works great and keeps the large containers lighter and easier to move if necessary. I tried the foam pellets before, yuk, what a mess to clean up.

I have added the soiless mix from containers to my gardens or compost pile before but this year I am using it for winter sowing without heating it first. Seems like I remember this discussion other years and others have reused the mix. I just sowed 92 containers yesterday so it's too early to know how it works. Will let you know later.

I reuse my potting soil. I use it for the bottom half of the container, and then use new potting mix for the top half. I have never had any problems with doing it that way.

gardenluv, I didn't think of that---great idea!

mnwsgal---another great idea!

Thank you, both!